2013 Strategic Talent Acquisition Conference Part 1
The pre-conference workshop of the 2013 Strategic Talent Acquisition conference was a day of real world solutions for actual problems facing practitioners in the market. President and CEO of PI Worldwide, Nancy Martini, declared, “talent acquisition is intimately related to talent retention,” and launched into some interesting statistics like millennials are 5x more likely to quit due to their boss and also that the replacement cost for the average position is 40-50% of the annual salary. The workshop began with an engaging activity led by PI Worldwide’s Megan Holsinger examining the pros and cons of hiring or promoting realistic candidate profiles and how the individual personalities would interplay with the current office culture sparking conversation not just about who but why.
The second session of the day focused on developing a winning strategy to identify both target schools and potential leadership candidates. Dave Hoy, Co-Founder of MBA focus explained how to leverage the relationship with the careers services office of top graduate business schools to maximize results. Assistant Dean & Director of the Career Development Office at Yale School of Management explained how the school focuses on developing future leaders for both business and society, teaching how to give and receive feedback and improve emotional intelligence. This session highlighted the differences in MBA candidates now and 20 years ago with a video from the 2012 Kellogg School of Management. Sharing some tips to inspire future hires, Kaye Collum, Director of Global Campus & Diversity Recruiting at Walmart, Inc., connects with high potentials within 2 weeks of their offer, letting the candidate know not only who their mentor will be when they start, but also each mentor will be at a minimum a vice president or higher.
The final session of the workshop expounded on the need for assessing the company and current workforce before finding the right talent. Chief Marketing Officer for Allegis Group Services, Bruce Morton, began with a brief history lesson on Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contact and related the exchange of peoples’ freedoms for rights with governments of the 1700s to the exchange of workers’ freedoms for rights with their employers today. Morton explained how for this year, 82% of new jobs in France are temporary positions. This continuing high percentage of contingent and temporary work is fundamentally shifting how employees view their relationship with their employers and leaders will need to adjust to remain successful. The session prescribed a 4 part plan to for future success for the firm; assess the workforce, develop the framework, workforce planning, and finally prepare for the influx of new talent and their retention.
In the talent market today, talent acquisitions leaders face an evolving landscape of employee/employer relationships and generational shifts. Luckily as evidenced in today’s workshop there are a variety of new tools and technologies available to assist and streamline talent acquisition processes improving both bottom line results and engagement with the workforce.