Employees are a company’s most valuable asset. Yet most Talent Management and Recruiting teams still rely heavily, if not exclusively, on an organization’s annual planning process to build out their “strategic” hiring plans.
Obviously, business plans evolve, with new market opportunities and strategic directions introduced throughout the year having a significant impact on both a company’s planned hiring cycles as well as its real estate choices. The result is that HR and Real Estate leaders who rely on “once a year” planning processes are forced to make ad-hoc, reactive decisions that impact not only current job openings but also their ability to effectively populate the organization for long-term success.
In today’s increasingly unpredictable world, a once-a-year approach to hiring plans no longer aligns with an organization’s ability to adapt, evolve, and even survive. Companies that rely only on this outdated “strategy” do so at their own peril.
Have an Agile Mindset
If most talent acquisition managers understand that today’s business environment can’t rely on a rigid, annual business planning process, isn’t it time for them to embrace a more proactive, flexible approach? The teams responsible for making the People and Places decisions within an organization need to adopt a more “Agile” mindset when it comes to their recruitment plans – one that will help create a hiring process that delivers optimal results for their business, both now and in the future.
Business agility has become increasingly crucial as HR teams vie for ways to gain a competitive advantage in recruiting, developing, and retaining employees. This is especially important in today’s business environment as we see the average employee tenure shrinking, resulting in a significant amount of time and other resources being spent on recruiting and training replacement talent.
Agile processes were originally created for the software industry to help streamline product development. Instead of improving software annually in one large batch, updates are made continuously throughout the year, enabling companies to better match the changing needs of their customers and their markets.
Several other industry sectors have since adopted this agile approach as it helps improve team collaboration, increase efficiencies and create happier “customers”. While hiring plans may seem an unlikely candidate for an agile model, this type of agility is critical to unlocking a better, more continuous approach to recruiting and retaining talent.
The key to success is enabling flexibility while maintaining organization. For example, if a business decides to transition to a hybrid workforce model halfway through the year, the HR team needs to understand how this will impact workplace locations and then pivot their recruiting efforts appropriately – without causing any disruption to the candidate pipeline. The good news is that HR teams today have a myriad of tools and technologies to enable this level of operational efficiency.
Embrace a Digital Approach
For organizations that are ready to embrace a modern, digital approach to hiring plans thoroughly, they should adopt a workforce and workplace management platform that enables them to proactively identify markets with the suitable candidates, with the right skills, and at the right time for the correct costs.
In addition, their Recruiting teams should be able to look beyond these typical candidate qualifications, so their hiring efforts better support the organization’s objectives relating to diversity, equality, inclusion, and more.
An additional benefit with this type of software-based platform is it will allow organizations to easily identify location-based talent pools in markets that align with their workforce models, as well as evaluate trends and insights (e.g., talent costs, hiring models, etc.) much earlier in the hiring process. The end result is a highly effective talent pipeline of qualified people interested in learning about new job opportunities as soon as they become available.
It’s time for Talent Acquisition and Management teams to change their relationship with the outdated, “annual only” approach to hiring plans. It’s in the best interests of all companies to adopt a more agile approach that enables them to successfully transition to the new era of continuous, proactive hiring.
Companies need to embrace the current business environment and leverage technology that enables them to anticipate what will happen in the future instead of reacting. If they don’t embrace agility, they will become part of the past.
