Talent acquisition leaders around the world face many of the same challenges: how to attract better candidates, how to optimize their hiring processes, and how to best employ technology to help their teams. But each country has a slightly different focus given its economic trends. 

The United Kingdom has faced unique challenges over the last several years: Brexit, runaway inflation, and a volatile economy that tilted from boom to recession almost overnight. To better understand talent acquisition trends in the UK, I sat down with Paul Marchant, Regional Vice President of Northern Europe at SmartRecruiters. 

“During the great resignation, it was so hard to hire that TA leaders were nearly always given the tools they needed,” Paul said. When the economy turned, he continued, “the pendulum swung back, and companies became more focused on cost and efficiency again.”

Brexit’s effect on immigration means that UK companies are competing harder for hourly talent. “The tightening of our border controls post-Brexit means that a lot of industries can’t get the labour they previously had access to,” Paul explained. Retail, hospitality, and transportation roles have been particularly hard hit. Despite the recent rise in cost-cutting, C-Suite awareness of the importance of talent acquisition hasn’t gone away. “Now everyone understands the strategic nature of TA,” he said. “However, this understanding brings a whole new layer of pressure and scrutiny to the practice.” 

Paul spoke about the need for greater cooperation between executive leadership and talent acquisition, particularly when it comes to technology decisions. “We’ve seen TA leadership in companies ready to sign a contract with SmartRecruiters, only to find out at the last minute that their leadership had already signed off on an ERP,” he said. “This level of internal disconnect is unsustainable.” With such immense capability differences between ERP recruiting modules and standalone solutions like SmartRecruiters, it’s crucial that TA leaders consistently demonstrate the business impact of their preferred solutions so that they can influence decisions.

A flexible foundation for hiring keeps companies agile

The ability to influence technology decisions becomes even more important in volatile times. Paul said, “You can start the year with huge hiring goals and be doing layoffs by the end.” With that kind of unpredictability, companies need a talent acquisition suite that can help them adapt quickly, whether that’s adjusting core processes or integrating with point solutions. 

“SmartRecruiters provides a core TA technology foundation that helps companies change, adapt, reshape, redeploy, add to, and control,” Paul said. “Our customers can do that themselves, at the speed they want, without dependence on us.” While customers can adjust their configurations without the involvement of IT or SmartRecruiters, we provide implementation support, ongoing customer service, and access to a community of peers. Combining these self-sufficient tools and best-in-class services enables our customers to achieve powerful outcomes. Our success stories with UK companies Frasers, CityFibre, and Colliers EMEA showcase their achievements. 

Keeping up with innovation in talent acquisition

With decades of experience in HR tech, Paul has seen waves of technology evolution. “There’s constant innovation in talent acquisition,” he said. “The cosmopolitan, global nature of the UK is reflected in the vendor marketplace.” For some, the amount of TA tech can be overwhelming, but Smartrecruiters’ commitment to its partner marketplace can help leaders narrow their decisions. “Not only do we have an R&D team focused solely on talent acquisition,” Paul said, “we have an alliances team that’s constantly researching the marketplace, taking feedback from customers, and looking at market trends so we can make the best functionality available in our ecosystem. Our goal is to help customers differentiate fads from the impactful new tools they should be considering.”

As a geographically small country, the UK offers many opportunities for TA leaders to come together and share best practices. Paul spoke appreciatively of the RL 100, an organization that promotes excellence in resourcing, the British word for talent acquisition. RL 100 members set the example, Paul said, “of being savvy, knowledgeable, and sophisticated at managing their internal relationships so that they get the resources they need to be successful.” Managing those relationships is the key to maintaining a seat at the table and being included in technology decisions that impact recruiting. 

The waves of change aren’t going to stop. “We don’t know what the future is,” Paul said. “But if you’ve got a flexible technology operating system with an ecosystem around it, you’ve taken a step toward future-proofing. SmartRecruiters makes it easier to deal with the unexpected.”

We’re hearing it more and more frequently now: HCM/HRIS/ERP recruiting modules hinder companies’ ability to provide an excellent candidate experience and keep TA teams from delivering upon the goals the business is asking of them. 

“Recruiting modules have not lived up to their promise,” said Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters. “In many ways, they’ve set the industry backward, and talent teams are struggling to leverage them and get results.”

Pandemic-related hiring challenges made the shortcomings of HCM recruiting modules more apparent. “The problem is big enough now that leaders are getting headwinds from the C-Suite to find something else that would work better,” Allyn said.

Too often, the decision to use the recruiting module of a larger HCM or HRIS was made before a TA leader’s arrival or without their consultation. While the benefits of an HCM to the HR team are many, the TA team quickly learns that limited functionality, long implementation times, plus high integration fees and maintenance costs leave them unable to deliver a positive candidate experience or respond rapidly to changing market demands.

Why Invest in a Dedicated Talent Acquisition Suite Instead of a Recruiting Module

“If you want to build a high-functioning talent acquisition team,” Allyn said, “you need systems that are built natively for that application and offer a high level of innovation to support you going forward.” 

A market-leading talent acquisition suite like SmartRecruiters focuses the majority of its R&D efforts on developing features that improve the hiring process. Because 100% of our company’s success depends on our recruiting product, we strive to make our system future-proof by staying up to date on the latest hiring trends and regulations. We listen to customers and prioritize their requests for features that will improve their workflows and help them adapt to changes in the hiring landscape (e.g., hybrid interviewing and salary transparency). Finally, we partner with best-of-breed point solutions to ensure customers have access to the newest technologies that support recruitment.

“Best-in-class point solutions help companies meet important and evolving needs,” Allyn said. “Companies need the ability to test and experiment with new solutions, so a core system with open APIs allows them to be more agile. It’s much easier to tie into a talent platform than an HRIS where the connections go much deeper.”

In 5 Ways Technology Helps Talent Acquisition Maintain Its Seat at the Table, we explain how technology helps TA leaders empower recruiters, foster the candidate experience, engage hiring teams, lead with data, and adapt to changing market needs. If your HCM recruiting module doesn’t check off those boxes, getting or maintaining a seat at the table will be challenging.

“Many TA leaders are trying to figure out how to build their business case so they can swap to a standalone recruiting solution,” Allyn said. Because companies are often locked into long contracts with their HRIS, it may take them several years to build the business case, get buy-in, research vendors, fill out RFPs, and finally, choose and implement a new solution. The effort may take a long time, but it’s worth it—for the business, recruiters, candidates, and all future hires. Read on for pointers on how to get started.

Components of the Business Case for a Talent Acquisition Suite

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but components of the business case may include the following:

System Implementation & Ongoing Maintenance

• Cost of customization during implementation
• Cost of integrations with point solutions (typically lower with a talent acquisition suite than with an HRIS because the configurations are often pre-existing from the core TA suite)
• Cost of increased risks of compliance failures due to potential HCM’s lack of global focus on hiring-specific needs

Candidate Experience

• Cost of degraded candidate experience and applicant drop-off due to long applications
• Limited customization options to unique hiring needs further degrade candidate experience
• Lack of accurate, actionable reporting hinders the ability to improve candidate experience

Employer Brand Impact

• Cost of lost applicants and rejected offers due to the inability to support the employer brand by delivering a seamless candidate experience
• Cost of impact to reputation due to poor interview/employee reviews and word-of-mouth

Business Impact

• Lower recruiter productivity due to the high level of administrative work
• Decreased recruiter job satisfaction leads to high turnover
• Inability for recruiters and TA to become business advisors due to lack of meaningful metrics that hold the business accountable
• Longer than necessary time-to-hire slows the company’s ability to meet revenue goals

Spending Impact

• Inefficient job advertising spending due to a lack of centralized job board management

How to Get Started Building the Business Case

If you find yourself waiting for the HRIS contract renewal date, the time to get started making the business case is now. Here are a few guidelines to help you get started.

1. Document processes and roadblocks. Process documentation is a part of any implementation, so knowing exactly how things are currently working and what’s not working will bring the clarity you need as you make the business case. Examine the technology checklist in our Seat at the Table ebook for a full list of areas to consider. 
2. Clarify impacts. What are the potential impacts of each of the areas you’ve named? The Building Blocks of a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function listed in the A Seat at the Table ebook should help by offering signs of underinvestment and high investment.
3. Research others’ experiences Many people have done exactly what you’re trying to do: replace an HCM recruiting module with a best-of-breed TA platform. Ask vendors for references, or look to their customer success stories to get inspiration. Learn how this global media company integrated SmartRecruiters with its SAP HCM.
4. Set a North Star vision for talent acquisition. Executives will be more likely to buy in if they know where you want to take the TA organization. Your research on others’ experiences combined with impact statements will help you develop a vision that motivates others.
5. Quantify the total cost of ownership. Cost is a big motivator for the C-Suite. Quantify annual fees, system maintenance costs, and costs of integrations against the other impacts listed above.
6. Begin the vendor search. By getting product demos from leading vendors, you will learn more about what’s possible. Your RFP can be developed to highlight the use cases that will have the most impact on your company. To get started, view our RFP template, and look for vendors who respond to your requests with enthusiasm and a spirit of collaboration.

“The people making the decisions about what technology needs to be leveraged should be the people who understand the complexities of using it,” Allyn said. If you’re a TA leader, there’s no one better to do that than you. We’re here to help. To get started, read our Guide to Evaluating the Business Value of a Talent Acquisition Platform today.

With so many ways to get recruiting wrong, how do you get it right? The growing influence of talent acquisition suggests that investing in recruiter training is one way for organizations to set themselves up for success. Josh Bersin listed “Cherish your recruiters” among his top trends for 2023.  He wrote,

Stop seeing them as just salespeople, and more as trusted advisors who can help decide if a candidate fits your culture, and arm them with powerful tools for sourcing, assessment, and selling you as a brand.

Josh Bersin in HR.com

We agree! Here are four reasons why investing in recruiters is a good idea.

1. Improve business outcomes. A Josh Bersin Company study found that companies that invest in their recruiting team are 4 times more likely to be leaders in innovation and 4.5 times more likely to achieve high levels of customer retention. That’s a compelling reason to invest in your recruiting team!
2. Expanded skillsets increase agility. The current decade has shown that change is the only constant. In just a few years, we’ve gone from mass pandemic layoffs to a talent shortage during the Great Resignation and back to mass layoffs again. When recruiters have a wide variety of skills in their toolbox, recruiting organizations can adapt more quickly to market changes. A diversely-skilled recruiting team can switch between activities such as sourcing, employer brand development, or assessment strategies as needs arise. Broadly-skilled recruiters who are experts in all things hiring become trusted partners to the business and add long-term value to your organization.
3. A positive influence on candidates. Recruiters are on the frontlines of your employer brand; they’re selling your employee experience to potential candidates every day. A dissatisfied recruiting team can influence candidates in subtle ways, while a disorganized hiring team can influence candidates in not-so-subtle ways. Investing in recruiters and elevating their position in the organization helps everyone align around a positive hiring experience–which should translate into a positive employee experience because the right people are in the right jobs.
4. Strategic positioning for talent acquisition. Empowered recruiters empower their leaders with current market trends, insight into candidates’ mindsets, and data that can both uncover roadblocks to meeting business goals and chart a path to business success. A strong recruiting team shores up a team leader, strengthening the value of their seat at the table.

4 Keys to Investing in Recruiters

What does an organization that invests in its recruiters look like? We spoke with Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, to come up with four key criteria of organizations that invest in their recruiting teams.

1. Time for upskilling. If recruiters are at 100% capacity, there’s no time left for training, experimentation, or open discussions that could lead to better processes and insights. Recruiters’ capacity needs to be taken into account before implementing any training program.
2. Ongoing training. What, exactly, do your recruiters need to learn to stay up to date? And what do individual recruiters want to learn? Whether it’s a monthly training session on a new area of recruitment or access to the latest classes on LinkedIn Learning or Social Talent, recruiters are at their best when they feel empowered to learn and discuss what they learn with peers. At Doka, a global formwork and scaffolding company, quarterly trainings help keep recruiters up to date.
3. Career pathing. As with any role in your organization, recruiters need to know about options for advancement. Career path options will help direct their learnings—and development check-ins will keep their newfound skills with you instead of without you at another company.
4. Access to modern tools—and the ability to experiment. Advanced recruiting organizations pilot new tools when new situations arise and sunset old tools when they become too cumbersome. Investing in a flexible ecosystem for hiring enables recruiters to adapt to the market so that they can ensure a great candidate experience while attracting the most qualified talent in the current age, not an age long past.

Essential Skillsets for Recruiters in a Strategic TA Function

Expertise with activities such as sourcing, employer branding, and interviewing are a given in recruitment. Allyn Bailey drew our attention to three additional skill areas that will help your recruiting team shine in their ability to become strategic partners to the business. A seat at the table for a talent acquisition leader hinges on a recruitment team that’s good at these three things:

1. Assessment process. Candidate assessment is the heart of the recruitment process. Exploring new ways to assess candidates through screening questions, AI- and game-based quantitative assessments, and capturing qualitative answers to interview questions helps recruiters strengthen their company’s ability to hire best-fit candidates. 
2. Data expertise. Leading with data is a requirement for any strategic talent acquisition function. Recruiters need to be able to report on their own activities, contextualize results, and determine the next steps in an informed way. Those newer to reporting may need to start with understanding what data they need to collect to make decisions, how to collect that data, and how to manage that data effectively. Read 6 Steps to a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy to learn more.
3. Talent analytics. Analytics backed up with labor market data allows recruiters to look across industries, skillsets, and locations to identify sources of talent. This type of intelligence is vital to operating a strategic TA function because it helps leaders come to the table with data-backed insights that can buck long-held assumptions.

A high-functioning recruiting team is just one aspect of leading a strategic TA function. For a deep dive into all the components, download our latest ebook, created in partnership with Allyn and the SmartRecruiters Hiring Success team.

Leading a team through a major technology implementation is a career milestone. Implementing a new talent acquisition platform often involves months of preparation and focused coordination of internal and external resources.

Every day, the customer service managers and implementation consultants at SmartRecruiters are busy helping one of our customers get up and running—or helping them evolve their hiring practices to adapt to new conditions. Some of these customers are so happy with the results that they take the extra step of telling their company’s story with SmartRecruiters in hopes that others can learn from their journeys.

If you think the challenge at your company is insurmountable, let the talent acquisition leaders whose stories are shared below prove you wrong. Their can-do spirit helped them achieve wins that included building a TA system from scratch, transforming high-volume hiring, attracting and retaining new talent, and supporting the success of people initiatives. If they can do it, you can too! 

You Can Start From Scratch

When Marcel Rütten joined PACCOR, a global packaging manufacturer, as the Global Director of Talent Acquisition & Employer Branding, the company had no system of record for recruiting. With careful planning, he used the time before SmartRecruiters went live to understand hiring practices in PACCOR’s 24 locations in 17 countries so that the company’s configuration and employer branding could be more effective. In PACCOR Builds Mature Recruiting Ecosystem in Less Than One Year, Marcel summed up the experience this way: 

[SmartRecruiters] gives recruiters and hiring managers everything they need to fill positions and track performance across channels.

 We have increased the maturity level within the whole organization so that everyone is capable and can use every available function. We have full transparency about our needs. We have a clearer picture of our target groups and what we need to say to them from an employer branding perspective. And we know what we need to budget.

Reporting on the full picture of hiring is a must for talent acquisition to have a seat at the table for talent decisions. Marcel’s thoughtful work in that first year set the stage for even greater maturity at PACCOR as the years progress.

You Can Transform High-Volume Recruiting

Frasers Group is a UK-based company that operates iconic brands such as Sports Direct, House of Fraser, Frasers, and FLANNELS. The company hires thousands of retail associates during the holiday season and throughout the year. Its previous system was outdated and not purpose-built for recruiting. Here’s what Adam Reynolds, Head of Talent Acquisition, said in Frasers Streamlines High-Volume Hiring with Automation in SmartRecruiters: 

We found it quite appealing that we could configure the [SmartRecruiters] system to suit all the different needs of what is, in essence, a sprawling estate: 22 countries, 30,000 employees, and 3,000 users of the system.

In the first year with SmartRecruiters, Frasers set a record of 20,000 new hires in one year. Adam added:

It was a game changer to have the templated job profiles, automated messages in our branding and tone of voice, and calendar integration. With the automation inside SmartRecruiters, we can move through high volumes of information from a high volume of candidates in a systematic way.

A great candidate experience is a hallmark of a strategic talent acquisition function. The automated and templated responses help Frasers maintain its reputation in a competitive hiring environment with candidates who are also likely to be customers.

You Can Improve Retention

When Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management, joined Colliers EMEA, a global real estate services and investment management company, SmartRecruiters was already in place, but adoption had slowed since its implementation. Once he started digging into the metrics in partnership with his SmartRecruiters representative, “the lightbulbs started to go off,” he said in an interview. Over time, the data he brought to the table provoked discussions and moved the needle on behaviors that supported better hiring and ultimately improved retention. 

In conjunction with enhancements to its employer brand, Colliers experienced “a massive uplift in candidates,” Ben said in How Colliers EMEA Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. The company began to attract talent from outside its conventional sources. The expansion of skillsets led senior executives to think differently about who Colliers hires, how they hire, and what the company could do to nurture that talent once they turned into employees.

The focus on hiring new types of talent resulted in a big win: Colliers EMEA saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. Ben’s experience sets an example for all TA leaders on how to maximize their seats at the table to achieve an overall talent-centric outcome.

You Can Support People Initiatives

Sustainability

Informa, a leading international events, digital services and academic knowledge group, puts a big focus on sustainability. To understand how the company’s credentials as a sustainable business factored into the choice to apply, Ben Wielgus, Head of Sustainability, set up specialized screening questions in SmartRecruiters. In How Informa Uses SmartRecruiters to Measure Sustainability Campaign Success, he said:

Because SmartRecruiters allows us to put the same questions to each candidate and rapidly deploy them to get results at scale, we’ve been able to get a much better understanding of how much our candidates care about sustainability, and how much of a difference it’s making in their choice to come to us.

DEI

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is another hiring topic on everyone’s minds, and CityFibre wanted to pave the way for more women and people from diverse backgrounds to work in its tech-focused roles. In CityFibre Hires for Diversity with SmartRecruiters, Richard Hutchinson, Head of Resourcing, explained the company’s data-driven approach:

We used [SmartRecruiters] Report Builder to create a DEI-focused report which helps us develop our attraction strategy, drive recruiter and hiring manager action, report on performance, and engage with our business stakeholders to present accurate and real-time insight into our DEI challenges and results.

Talent acquisition demonstrates its true value by supporting the direction in which the business needs to evolve. With accurate and actionable recruiting data, companies can make progress on even the most challenging goals.

You Can Start Today

What these leaders have in common is a desire to do the right thing: provide an exceptional candidate experience, deliver top talent to the business, and analyze the results of their efforts. They’re on a journey of continually growing their strategic leadership skills as market conditions change. 

In support of your journey, we’ve created a resource to guide you to getting—or making the most of—your seat at the table. Download the ebook today.

The role of talent acquisition has changed substantially in the last few decades. Long viewed as an administrative function, recruiting was seen as a cost center, and systems were built to support this mentality. 

If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that the old model and old systems no longer work in a candidate-driven market. Recruiters need to be marketers, data analysts, and organizational enablers all-in-one. And TA leaders need to ensure that their teams have the technology to support this expanded role so that their companies can compete in an ever-changing marketplace for talent.

Data from the recruiting tech stack gives TA leaders the ability to become strategic partners to the business – valued participants in the evolution of a company’s talent strategy. But how does one navigate this sea of solutions for everything from a core applicant tracking system to point solutions for background checks and assessments?

In a conversation with SmartRecruiters Hiring Success experts Dave Novak, Engagement Manager, and Jared Best, Regional Practice Leader, I explored the topic, “What can talent acquisition leaders ask of their technology that will help them obtain and maintain their seat at the table?” Some of those ideas are summarized in our ebook,   A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function. This article takes a deeper dive into five key points in the ebook’s eight-point Technology Checklist.

1. Empower Recruiters

“If you don’t have the right technology, your recruiters spend a lot of time doing administrative, non-value-added work,” said Dave Novak. “Recruiters should be focused on talent: sourcing talent, talking to talent, negotiating with talent, hiring talent. If they’re spending too much time filling out spreadsheets and coordinating schedules, they’re not maximizing their value proposition to your organization.” 

An Aptitude Research survey found that only 48% of recruiters are satisfied with their technology, compared to 78% of TA leaders. This disconnect shows how important it is for TA leaders to choose technology that makes recruiting easier, not harder.

2. Foster the Candidate Experience

“A hallmark of a mature TA organization is the acceptance that the candidate is at the center of everything they do,” said Dave. “It has to be a synchronous experience for the candidate and the employee who comes through the system. The ideal scenario is that your talent acquisition processes provide a realistic preview of how your company operates and what it’s going to be like once they get hired.” That includes everything from your talent attraction methods, career site, interviewing experience, and onboarding process. 

Reducing the number of clicks in an application and connecting systems with automation improves the candidate experience and drastically reduces the time to fill. KinCare saw a 60% reduction in candidate drop-off when they reduced the time to complete an application from 17 minutes to 3-5 minutes.

3. Engage Hiring Teams

“Another hallmark of a mature TA function is that your organization engages with the hiring process,” Dave said. “When your system invites engagement, people use it consistently, which enables you to tell a story with data.” With more visibility into the impact of their behaviors, “hiring teams can get excited about building an awesome interview process,” he said.

KinCare experienced a growth in organizational trust once they implemented new hiring software. Ben Rynja, Head of Talent Acquisition at KinCare said, “It’s become more of a collaborative environment. When you’ve got transparency, you’ve got trust. Trust was no longer an issue.”

4. Lead with Data

“Good talent leaders need to make data-driven decisions, said Jared Best, “but many are  handcuffed by not being able to report on the full picture of the TA funnel.” Echoing Ben Rynja’s experience, he said “Data allows leaders to hold not only their teams accountable but also their partners in the business.” Jared also mentioned how important data is in the journey to being viewed as a strategic partner rather than a cost center. “Data can help you better position your story around where the gaps are in driving equal partnership from the organization,” Jared said. “It helps you justify additional resources and investments because you can explain the past performance and forecast scenarios about the future.”

“Reporting has to be pragmatic and accessible for the organization,” Dave Novak added. “Sometimes the data is there, but it’s not presented in a way that people can easily understand it.” Read our post 6 Steps to a Talent Acquisition Reporting Strategy for tips on how to get started on leading with data.

5. Adapt to Changing Recruiting Practices

A system’s level of technical flexibility—with the help of open APIs—helps companies adapt to change. Recent examples of the need for flexibility include the pandemic-induced pivot to video interviewing and new salary transparency laws in many states. “Your platform should be nimble,” Jared said. “You shouldn’t need an entire HRIT team to support you.” Today’s strategic teams typically have a TA ops resource rather than a big HRIT team that takes months to make updates. A platform that supports self-service and has built-in integrations enables changes to be made in days rather than months. 

When a talent acquisition team is seen as flexible and responsive, they’re better positioned to maintain their influence within an organization. For example, CityFibre relied on SmartRecruiters to ensure its DEI initiative was carried through the recruiting process, earning the company an award along the way. And Informa found out how to weave its company-wide sustainability initiative into its messaging to attract talent. 

There’s no end to the creative ways that talent acquisition can be involved in company-wide people initiatives. For a deeper dive into understanding how to get and maintain your seat at the table, download our ebook today. Read this post for a sneak peek at the contents. 

In the post-pandemic world, the rules of hiring fundamentally changed—along with the expectations for talent acquisition. When businesses struggled to hire during the rebound from the pandemic cutbacks, the star of talent acquisition rose from its historical position as a cost center in many organizations. Talent acquisition had its seat at the proverbial table, but when recession fears took hold, TA lost its place amidst layoffs and hiring freezes at some companies.

Talent needs to be center stage for businesses to adapt and thrive in 2023 and beyond. To do this, talent acquisition needs to maintain its seat at the table—or step up if it hasn’t already. Trends like flexible work, DEIB, and workplace automation have all made employers think differently about who and how they hire. 

A cost center that speaks in the language of speed and efficiency does not offer the strategic perspective organizations need to hire effectively amidst rapidly changing employee and candidate expectations. When talent acquisition earn a seat at the table for strategic talent decisions, businesses are more likely to reach their full potential.

According to the Josh Bersin Company, companies that leverage the right recruiting strategies are

• 5X more likely to delight customers
• 30X more likely to engage and retain employees
• 35X more likely to innovate effectively.

Leveraging the right recruiting strategies is not just the job of talent acquisition teams; it’s a job for the whole organization. 

A Seat at the Table Defined

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director of Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, has spent decades at the forefront of global talent acquisition. In our latest ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function, Allyn says,

“Having a seat at the table means not just being involved in decisions directly related to talent acquisition, it means providing input into all decisions that have a talent lens to them.”

If a talent acquisition leader wants to get a seat at the table, they must move from the perception of their function as a cost center to a strategic function. Allyn says,

 “A strategic TA leader is a trusted partner who can come to the table with information that tells business leaders what’s happening in the market, what’s realistic to assume, and how their decisions will impact the company’s ability to capture and keep talent.” 

The journey to becoming a strategic leader—someone who gets invited to meetings because it’s widely known that they have valuable information and perspective that can help the business make high-priority decisions—is varied and complex. It requires that a leader shift their mindset from being an order-taker to someone who provides data-backed insights.

Leading a strategic talent acquisition function is not always easy. Allyn asked, “If  you don’t have a seat at the table today, why not?” The reasons could be a blend of personal and organizational factors. She recommends that leaders get clear about why they want that seat and what they might do with it once they get there.  

To help leaders along this journey, we spent hours interviewing Allyn and two members of SmartRecruiters’ Hiring Success team: Dave Novak, Engagement Manager, and Jared Best, Regional Practice Leader. In those conversations, we uncovered a path for leaders to become more strategic and get the seat at the table they deserve. Our insights are condensed into the ebook  A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function. 

Below we list highlights from key sections of the ebook:

Strategic Talent Acquisition Maturity Model

For each level shown in the maturity model above, the ebook offers example scenarios so that you can assess your company and start forming your own North Star vision. To get a real-world picture of how one organization moved to greater maturity, read The Incremental Journey to Talent Acquisition Transformation at Colliers EMEA.

Know Your Why: Reasons to Build a Strategic TA Function

The benefits of getting a seat at the table fall into three areas: to help your organization, support your team, and grow your own career. We expand on each of these areas and provide reflection activities in the ebook so that you can move ahead with inner confidence.

Know What You’re Signing Up For: Barriers to Becoming More Strategic

In our discovery conversation, Allyn Bailey said, “Leaders need to assess their organization’s ability to absorb them into the conversation.” She spoke of the time it takes for organizations to change and said, “Pay attention to the signals that you’re making traction. People will be asking smarter questions and start to repeat words that you’ve inserted into the conversation and adopting them as their own.”

The ebook lists eight common barriers with potential solutions and includes a reflection activity for your company’s situation. For inspiration, read our success story with KinCare which describes the growth of organizational trust after the implementation of SmartRecruiters.

The Path to Getting a Seat at the Table

Our Hiring Success experts have observed many organizations going through the stages of building a strategic function. We can’t emphasize enough that it’s not just a shift for the individual leader; it’s a shift for the whole organization, and it requires many conversations. This section outlines six stages that you can expect to go through.

The Building Blocks of a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function

A strategic TA leader oversees seven critical components of talent acquisition. Your company may be more invested in some than others. Here you’ll find a list of signs of under-investment and high investment. Looking at the list can help you get clear on where you need to start so that you can generate a small win and develop a plan to address larger issues.

How to Change the Narrative to Become More Strategic

Being perceived differently means talking about different things. In the case of talent acquisition, it means understanding what the business cares about and bringing valuable information to the table. “The biggest thing a leader can do is change the narrative,” said Jared Best. “Move away from talking about transactional data and focus on data that ties back to organizational objectives.” This section offers three strategies to do just that, plus a reflection activity.

People Support for Your Seat at the Table

As a strategic leader, you will need the help of not only your team but also others within the organization. Here you’ll find a list of 10 key roles on your support team and their responsibilities.

Technology Support for Your Seat at the Table

Your recruiting tech stack may or may not be optimally configured to support your strategic priorities. To help you clarify what technology concerns you may need to address, we created an 8-point technology checklist for building a strategic talent acquisition function.

We’d love to say that there’s a magic wand you can wave and have a perfectly functioning TA team that attracts and hires the best candidates, facilitates recruiter productivity, and engages hiring managers—while increasing employee retention and profits. Instead, we live in a complex reality, and we hope this guide will be one resource to help you get to where you want to go.

How does a company’s talent acquisition function tie in with talent management? And can talent acquisition (TA) move the needle on transforming an organization’s overall talent strategy?

That’s the remit Ben Handyside, Director of Talent Management for EMEA, was presented with when he joined Colliers in 2020. The company had already implemented SmartRecruiters two years before, but its hiring practices were still inconsistent across its 119 offices and 42 countries in the region. “Everyone got excited in the first phase of SmartRecruiters implementation, but in the second year, usage dropped off,” Ben said.

In a quest to hire better people, improve retention, and help employees develop their careers in Colliers’ decentralized talent framework, the company embarked on a holistic effort to transform talent management. “Talent acquisition was one pillar of a broader group that was put in place to drive greater levels of consistency and maturity in talent management overall,” Ben explained.

After digging into the data, Ben and his team saw gaps in the company’s adoption of SmartRecruiters. Once he connected with his SmartRecruiters representative, the lightbulbs started to go off.  “I quickly realized that the power of the system is its simplicity,” he said.  “It’s easy to use. But when you combine that with the relationship and the ability to discuss and analyze the data, it enabled me to understand where we needed to go strategically.”

SmartRecruiters covered the more tactical pieces of the talent acquisition transformation in our success story, How Colliers Reduced Agency Spending with SmartRecruiters. That document tells the story of how consistent hiring practices combined with recruitment marketing, a CRM, and the company’s employer branding efforts resulted in a massive improvement in the company’s ability to make direct hires. But behind the scenes, the story is more nuanced – and profound. Yes, you want your company to save money, but you also want to make better hires because those are the people who will be driving revenue for the business in the future. 

Putting all the pieces together that contribute to making better hires requires a shift in thinking among executives, hiring managers, and recruiters across the organization. Here’s how the partnership with SmartRecruiters helped the Colliers EMEA talent acquisition team achieve an organizational mindset shift.

A Vision for Talent Acquisition

The most obvious gap was a need for awareness and education – but the need went deeper than that. “There was a need for consistency in approach, but also alignment to vision and an appreciation of what talent acquisition can deliver.”

With the vision in place, it became Ben’s mission to position talent acquisition as a strategic enabler for the business. “Talent acquisition itself can impact the bottom and top line,” Ben said. “People don’t think like that in many businesses. They just kind of think ‘why can’t you hire me someone? Why is it taking so long?’”

When talent acquisition is positioned at the center of an organization, hiring managers become more involved in making thoughtful hiring decisions. “Recruitment is an enterprise sport,” Ben said. To make true change happen, though, Ben’s team had to educate not just the HR community, but also the senior leadership team. Data proved to be the key to the success of the transformation.

Improving Data Literacy

Data has the power to educate, but people need to understand what the data means and how to ask more questions of it. Stakeholders may be experts in one type of data, but data literacy for talent acquisition is an acquired skill set that evolves over time. Stakeholders needed time to get up to speed and understand the impact of adjustments to hiring practices, and Ben had to slow down his expectations that change could happen overnight. 

Conclusions that may be obvious to an expert take time to land in others, especially if the data indicates a need to adjust old ways of thinking and behaving. After a series of monthly stakeholder meetings, Ben said, “The questions started to change and shift, which meant they were getting comfortable in their understanding.”

If recruitment is an enterprise sport, the work of a total talent transformation is another type of team sport — one that’s supported with compelling reports. “Data proved to be foundational in driving awareness and understanding where our gaps were,” Ben said. “When you talk to people and ask a lot of questions, you start to get interesting answers. You also start to see the big picture.”

Data Facilitates Accountability

Supporting the new vision of talent acquisition for Colliers requires that everyone using SmartRecruiters utilizes the system properly. “The philosophy of ‘do the basics well’ drives a different level of performance,” Ben said. Once utilization started improving, Colliers could see cost savings in terms of reduced agency spending. 

When people are held accountable, they’re more likely to adopt new processes. The immediate availability of data in SmartRecruiters, plus the regularly scheduled reporting meetings helped Colliers’ hiring teams see that their daily actions could add up to a big impact. “What fascinates me about SmartRecruiters is that you can go to the day, the hour, the second of an intervention,” Ben said. “It gives us the ability to understand the trends in our recruitment business, diagnose how well things are working, and identify where the opportunities sit. It’s also really intuitive, so you can’t get it wrong.”

Talent Acquisition Moves the Needle on Total Talent Transformation

Hiring people at a lower cost was just the beginning of the TA transformation at Colliers. Improvements in quality of hire and retention are where the real transformation lies. Colliers had already noted that its employer branding and recruitment marketing helped attract a different caliber of people to the business. The real result showed up downstream: Colliers saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires. 

Starting with talent acquisition, Colliers achieved a total talent win: they attracted better people, kept candidates engaged to the point of hire, and successfully engaged them as employees.

People + Technology = Hiring Success

We asked Colliers how to summarize the factors that contribute to the achievement of hiring success. Ben’s first take was, “Ensure the product is simple to use because then people will use it.”  But it wasn’t just the system that facilitated a major change in the way Colliers attracts and manages talent. He explained, “the real value lies in the combination of people and technology.”

Mentioning his SmartRecruiters customer success manager, Ben continued, “As your relationship evolves, you start to talk a lot more about what really matters to your business and begin to formulate a workable strategy.” Sometimes you don’t know what’s possible until someone shows you — and sometimes, you need to know the boundaries of the system to make your efforts successful.

“SmartRecruiters is the best system I’ve used,” Ben said. “It’s a best-in-class system, and it’s backed up by support. That human, interpersonal relationship is really important.” 

Lessons from Colliers

Where your company starts and where it needs to go may differ from Colliers, but these lessons apply to anyone looking to save on recruiting costs, improve hire quality, and increase retention of new hires.

• Align talent acquisition with the overall talent strategy
• Create a vision for what TA can achieve
• Enlist a best-in-class talent acquisition platform
• Partner with your technology provider to get the most out of the system
• Hold stakeholders accountable with metrics to ensure system adoption
• Back up results with regular reporting to stakeholders
• Be patient as stakeholders gain data literacy
• Connect TA and HR metrics to measure the downstream impact

A full-scale talent acquisition transformation is an evolution – and we’d love to partner with you to get started. For a deep dive into how you can lead more strategically, download our ebook, A Seat at the Table: A Guide to Leading a Strategic Talent Acquisition Function.

Generation Z (born 1997-2012) workers comprise about 12.6% of the workforce as of 2020, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but will account for 27% of the workforce by 2025. As the years progress, employers will need to adapt to Gen Z as they seek to hire and retain employees. Luckily, their preferences are good for all workers, not just young ones.

Well-being and Mental Health 

According to Indeed, 80% of all job seekers look for information about employee wellbeing when they are considering a job opportunity. For GenZ, this need is more acute compared to other generations: 

• An astounding 55% of Gen Z workers report having either been diagnosed with or having received treatment for mental illness (compared with 31 percent of people aged 55 to 64 reporting the same). 
• 83% of employees believe their well-being is just as important as their salary, and 85% of employees are more likely to stay in their role if their employer focuses more on well-being.

Promoting sustainable ways of working is good not just for Gen Z, but for all employees. Employers can lead the way in preventing burnout during times of global crisis.

• Nearly half of employees (48%) say their well-being declined in 2022, and 28% say they are miserable at work.
• On Glassdoor, 63% of U.S. companies’ benefit reviews report using the words “mental healthcare.” 
• In 2022, less than half of job ads on Indeed contained health insurance information.

Companies that lead the way in supporting employee well-being and promoting it to job seekers have a competitive advantage in 2023 and beyond. To capture candidates’ interest, be sure your wellness initiatives are mentioned on your career site.

Diversity, Inclusion, Equity, and Belonging

Gen Z is the most diverse generation to date. 

• In the US, 52% of Gen Z’ers identify as non-Hispanic white, compared to 61% of millennials and 70% of Gen X’ers when they were the same age. 
• A Gallup US survey found that 15.9% of Gen Z identify as LGBT, compared to 9.1%  of Millenials and 3.8% of Gen X.

Gen Z candidates look for employers’ commitment to DEIB when applying for jobs. They also want to see themselves represented when they apply for jobs.

• 75% of Gen Z candidates said they would reconsider applying to a company if they were unsatisfied with its D&I efforts.
• When analyzing a company, interacting with a diverse set of individuals throughout the hiring process, was considered important by 78% of Gen Z women and 60% of Gen Z men.

Recent events have highlighted everyone’s awareness of diversity topics, and its definition has expanded far beyond race, gender, and sexual orientation. Companies that create a sense of belonging for everyone regardless of age, ability, neurology, family background, caregiver status, and so on will improve their ability to attract talent of all ages, not just those in Gen Z.  

Upskilling and Career Development

It should be no surprise that the youngest generation in the workforce wants to learn and grow their skills. 

• In early 2022, 76% of Gen Z professionals said they were looking for more opportunities to learn/practice new skills or expertise, compared to 55% of Millennials and 48% of Gen X.

In the height of the Great Resignation, many employees took the chance to upskill and ran with it by job-hopping.

• 74% of Gen Z and Millenials said they are ready to move on due to subpar skills-building support or a lack of career mobility options.

But the layoffs of 2022 and a changing economic environment left employees with a desire to hold on to their jobs. Instead of looking to upskill by job hopping, employees of all ages are looking to their employers to help them and even skill-building on the side.

• By October 2022, 89% of all employees said they’re “extremely” or “somewhat” motivated to improve their skills in the coming year, and 88% are already putting a significant amount of time and effort toward upskilling.

Evidence is everywhere that the world is changing fast. Employees of all ages can sense that upskilling is necessary not just for career advancement but to keep working at all.

Showing candidates how you can help them grow their skills into the future will help you attract the most motivated employees.  And by evaluating them fairly on the skills they already have, you’ll offer validation for their skill-building efforts.

Want to learn more about hiring for skills? Read our ebook  A Practical Guide to Hiring for Skills.

Internal mobility is a time-tested strategy for improving retention: LinkedIn 2022 data shows a 19-point lift in retention for those who made an internal move during a 2-year period of employment.

In 2021, companies looked toward internal mobility as a way of addressing the Great Resignation. By 2022, the Great Resignation dwindled to a close when recession fears increased and layoffs abounded. 

• In October 2022, the share of job seekers planning to quit their jobs within the next six months sat at 36%, down from an August 2021 high of 73%.
• According to Joblist, 47% of candidates said concerns about a potential recession had made them less likely to quit their jobs.

The alternative to quitting one’s job came to be known as “quiet quitting,” a term that entered the news in August 2022. This new term for the old problem of “phoning it in” speaks to the outdated expectation that employees should perform at unsustainable levels for endless periods of time. 

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, Hiring Success Services at SmartRecruiters, shared her perspective with SHRM in the article, Quiet Quitting: New Term for an Old Problem in a Changed Workplace:

“[Quiet quitting] is a performance issue—a behavior issue—and it’s always kind of existed,” she said. “What’s really happening, and what HR executives need to assess, is their employee population really redefining what the psychological contract is between companies and employees.” The crux of the problem, according to Bailey, is that employees are no longer buying into the myth that to be successful they have to subscribe to the “hustle culture and be always available and always ‘on’ 100 percent of the time.” 

A Better Hiring Process Can Prevent Quiet Quitting and New Hire Churn

If companies now have employees who would rather leave but have decided to stay, the importance of employee engagement and talent development increases. A 2022 survey by Lattice revealed that employee engagement unseated talent acquisition as a key priority for HR leaders:  41% of respondents reported that employee engagement is their top priority. Only 17% said talent acquisition was a priority, down from 39% in 2021.

In this environment, the focus of talent acquisition shifts in two ways:

• how do we hire talent who will stay engaged? 
• how do we continue to offer new opportunities to the talent we already have?

To address both scenarios, it’s even more important for TA teams need to double down on their hiring processes and internal mobility strategies:

• An October 2022 survey revealed that nearly 3 in 5 (59%) managers say their organization is engaging in the practice of what economists call “labor hoarding” – a trending behavior among employers who have struggled to retain talent and want to avoid falling victim to another labor shortage.
• But, 74% of HR professionals admitted to compromising candidate quality due to time pressures in response to the Great Resignation and a tight labor market.

Now that the Great Resignation has turned to what may become the Great Retention, it’s time for employers to stop compromising candidate quality. To do so, they need to consistently deliver a structured hiring process so that hiring teams can evaluate candidates on the criteria that matter most to the business. And to prevent quiet quitting and improve retention, employees need a job listing system that’s to use and offers transparency to hiring teams.

• CityFibre sourced 21% of hires from internal employees in the first three months with SmartRecruiters Employee Portal.
• By revamping its hiring processes in conjunction with SmartRecruiters, Colliers EMEA saw a 25% year-over-year increase in retention for first-year hires.

Your next set of new hires should stay with your company because they’re a good fit for their jobs and have development opportunities, not because they’re afraid of a recession. 

Looking ahead, companies that build strong processes for talent acquisition and internal mobility will weather any storm, whether it’s a full-fledged recession or another wave of resignations.

One of the most significant ways COVID-19 changed the workplace is by making remote work possible for many types of employees. It turns out that employees like remote work so much that they don’t want to return to normal — or even adapt to hybrid work — because they have not experienced a loss of productivity.

In 2022, the debate about bringing people back to the office reached peak intensity. Companies like Apple and GM announced return-to-the-office policies only to walk back their request after employees protested.

• A Monster survey revealed that 40% of workers would quit if they were forced to return to the office even one day a week. 

• According to the Future Forum, the remote work debate was a tug-of-war between executives and employees: non-executives are more than three times as likely as their bosses to want to work fully remotely.

When it comes to hiring, remote work opens up talent pools. Companies can attract candidates who live in faraway states or rural areas – and they might be more likely to be from diverse groups.

• One survey found that remote jobs attract 2.2x as many candidates as non-remote​ jobs and 2.2x more women.
• In September 2022, remote job posts on LinkedIn comprised 14% of all posts but received 52% of all US applications.
• On Ladders, a site for jobs that pay over $100,000 per year, 36% of all postings for professional jobs were remote in 2022, up from 4% in 2019.

The power of remote work is flexibility

Workplace flexibility – on or off-site – is a productivity driver for people who want balance as they attend to life demands or caregiving responsibilities.

• Workers with full schedule flexibility report 29% higher productivity and 53% greater ability to focus than those without the ability to shift their schedule. 

The availability of flexible work options has a direct impact on companies’ ability to hire and retain employees.

• A 2022 survey of CEOs revealed that the number one driver of attrition was the inflexibility of work options and hours.
• Remote-friendly companies experience 33% lower turnover, demonstrating the importance of hybrid/remote work as a driver for retention as well as productivity. 

Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, SmartRecruiters Hiring Success Services, shared her perspective on hiring in the era of flexible work in Worklife, ‘A lot of messiness’: Will hybrid working ever really work?.

“Those [employers] that are not offering some sort of flexibility or employee autonomy are having a hard time competing for top talent because people just won’t apply. That’s what’s pushing a lot of the HR strategies.”

Questions to consider for remote and hybrid hiring

In 2023, talent leaders will need to consider their teams’ ideal makeup and workflows in the era of distributed work. And recruiters will need to revisit their processes to ensure alignment. Allyn Bailey suggested this future-minded, people-driven approach:

“HR teams need to take a deep breath and ask three questions: What does the real world look like today for people? What does the business need? How do I think about forward-looking strategies rather than trying to retrofit what I thought worked before?”

– Allyn Bailey, Executive Director, Hiring Success Services in Human Resources Director, SmartRecruiters exec: Here’s the problem with hybrid work

As you think about forward-looking strategies, consider the success of your current remote/hybrid processes and look for areas to improve. Here are some additional questions to consider:

• Which teams work best remotely together? Which positions can we make fully remote? 
• Which geographic areas will we recruit from? How will this change our recruitment marketing strategy?
• How will we manage the mix of off- and on-site interviews for candidates hired for hybrid roles? 
• What promises about time on-site can we make to candidates that we know we can keep? How will we communicate our policies in job ads and during the recruiting process?
• How will we build an equitable hiring process that evaluates candidates without bias – including proximity bias?
• What does effective onboarding look like in a hybrid/remote scenario? How can we ensure everyone starts on the same page and is set up for success?

There’s not likely to be one answer to these questions, so you will need recruiting software that can adapt to any scenario – and partners who can guide you. We’d love to help.