Advancing Recruiting’s Value Through Uncertain Times: Shaping the Workforce | Gartner

Many organizations continue to face challenges in attracting and hiring talent to meet their business needs. As a result, they are increasingly reevaluating and reinventing their recruiting and talent acquisition practices. A few tactics I previously shared to address this issue include 1) Expanding selection criteria to identify hidden talent. 2) Activating the internal talent marketplace to deploy internal talent quickly—where and when needed, 3) Simplifying the application process to reduce candidate drop-out rate due to lengthy and complex application procedures. This 18-page Gartner paper builds on some of these previously shared ideas. Page 9 notes that business leaders typically define hiring needs by articulating the candidate profile they want to see in the role, relying on presumptions that desired skills are tied to certain qualifications or experiences. More often than not, hiring managers recycle the last job description and add new desired skills to the list, creating an impossible task for recruiters who must search the labor market for these “unicorn” candidates. However, effective recruiters shift the conversation away from desired hiring manager profiles and toward defining the essential skills needed to get the job done (see Figure 8). Figure 11 on page 12 illustrates how hiring processes often exclude viable talent from nontraditional talent pools, including those candidates that are “self taught” and have the skills to perform a line of work, but lack traditional credentials. Other ideas are discussed.