Transforming talent sourcing: Humans, technology or both?

Connecting...

Transforming talent sourcing: Humans, technology or both?

Talent acquisition leads wholeheartedly embrace the strategic value you’re bringing to your organisations, but this hasn’t changed the fact that your teams are still bogged down by an incredulous amount of time spent on talent sourcing. Things can’t keep going on like this. It is important for talent acquisition professionals to reclaim precious time to focus on what matters - strategic business partnering and winning top talent into your organisations.

Let’s have a look at what organisations are doing about this.

Bring on the humans
It’s not uncommon to see organisations addressing their talent sourcing demands by expanding their in-house talent acquisition teams. However, with headcount expansion being a luxury for most organisations in this current market, more and more clients have started to question the efficacy of this approach.

Look beyond the shores
Offshore sourcing solutions have been in the market for a while. I remember having conversations with agencies in lower-cost countries 10 years ago, during the early stages of my recruitment career. They promised to provide me with dedicated, capable and cost-efficient consultants who understand my business and recruitment requirements, at a fraction of what we would pay an HR person in Singapore to cover the same work.

Frankly, service delivery left much to be desired after I signed on the dotted line. Some of you with similar experiences may relate to misaligned candidate profiles and feedback of unrealistic hiring requirements. We were lucky to be on a short-term contract and I did not need much motivation to cease the arrangement as soon as I could. 10 years later, not much has changed. We still find companies set up in less expensive countries maximising the use of their LinkedIn accounts and leaning on cost arbitrage through cheaper labour to make a profit. Offshore sourcing solutions may serve a noble cost-saving purpose, but is it as viable as it should be? Bad hiring decisions are proven to cost organisations far more in the long term.

The recruitment model has been slow to evolve. Conventional strategy has been to scale through headcount and manpower, whether internal or external. “Got a recruitment problem? Let’s fix it by expanding our in-house teams, outsourcing the work and bringing on the human firepower.” Does that sound familiar to you? This may have worked back in the days, but is now proving costly in today’s business landscape.

Load the artillery
Enter HR tools and technology. Progressive HR and talent acquisition teams are revolutionising their talent sourcing through tech investment. The idea is to automate the tedious, time-consuming talent sourcing task so HR and talent acquisition professionals can be more productive. By harnessing machine learning and artificial intelligence, organisations are able to achieve cost efficiency and work dependability. Better yet, the recruitment technology continuously gets better at what it’s designed to do for you.

Sounds promising? I ask myself if HR technology is the silver bullet to transforming the talent acquisition function. Having evaluated several solutions in the market, I can devote another article on the merits and considerations of technology adoption. For now, the advice I would leave with you is: Please not invest in a software thinking you can go on auto-pilot after that. The tech adoption cycle is a marathon. You need to invest time and human effort to maximise technology’s full potential.

Technology and the Human Touch
My view is, the best piece of technology requires human leverage. It would be a mistake to rely on one or the other alone in isolation. HR is ultimately a people-centred function. HR technology can and should free up our time to focus on what matters, but it does not and certainly should not eliminate human expertise from the recruitment process.

To address this, EBC has developed a Sourcing-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that combines a suite of tested technology with human intelligence to help organisations reach a wider universe of qualified candidates.

This model resonates with our clients because the talent acquisition teams are unencumbered by the need to implement the technology or integrate it within their current IT infrastructure. In-house TA teams do not even need to be trained to use the technology. They need only to interface with professional recruiters who will harness the power of technology with their human expertise to deliver immediate and measurable outcomes: Qualified candidate profiles with clear intent for career discussion with our clients.

With the sourcing function well taken care of, talent acquisition teams are able to now spend their time nurturing and converting these candidates, developing their talent pipeline and building closer internal stakeholder relationships.

To learn how our Sourcing-as-a-Service solution can help your organisation, register for a free virtual workshop below. The team will be in touch to schedule a tailored one-on-one workshop at your availability.

If you’re wanting to implement technology into your recruitment and need a sounding board to get started, feel free to connect with me too. Our team has undergone rigorous reviews of options in the market and I’d be happy to share what I’ve learnt with you.

_linkedin_partner_id = "571043"; window._linkedin_data_partner_ids = window._linkedin_data_partner_ids || []; window._linkedin_data_partner_ids.push(_linkedin_partner_id); (function(){var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; var b = document.createElement("script"); b.type = "text/javascript";b.async = true; b.src = "https://snap.licdn.com/li.lms-analytics/insight.min.js"; s.parentNode.insertBefore(b, s);})();