You probably aren’t, and you’re not alone. However, you can ill afford to ignore this vital part of your organisations Talent Acquisition life-cycle. Within it lies enormous opportunity to improve every aspect of how your function acquires and delivers talent to your business.

Talent Acquisition is a vital process. It is one of the key vehicles that delivers the lifeblood of any company – it’s people. Talent Acquisition is also big business. With a plethora of products, solutions, services and tools to invest your budget in:

The list goes on and on, and it swells each year. It’s a complicated landscape and an increasingly confusing marketplace to navigate. Talent Acquisition professionals the world over are facing “solution congestion.” Rapidly becoming desensitised to the genuine progress and transformational working that leaps in technology development are bringing.

Then to add to the decision making burden, do you follow the approach of using one mega tech suite, like a Workday or SuccessFactors. Implementing every module in the hope that what you lose in functional capability you will gain in creating a “single point of truth” data flow...

Or do you create your own ecosystem of best of breed solutions that are individually excellent at what they do. Then try to integrate them to one another in a technological “daisy chain”?

As already noted, the “start” of Talent Acquisition sits squarely with the operational manager. They have the hiring demand that needs supplying. They instigate the beginning of the process, whether that be picking the phone up to the TA team or creating a new requisition via a self-serve ATS portal.

From this point on, the ensuing process is often designed and optimised to the Nth degree. Prescribed ATS workflows are followed, automated communications activated, robotic process-based activities are administered – resulting in a hire...at some point.

Is this right?

As a HR / Talent professional, have you ever taken a considered step back and viewed your organisations talent acquisition needs from an objective, unemotional perspective?

Have you challenged yourself to look at Talent Acquisition as if it were a new problem, that needed a new solution? If you did, the likelihood is that you would design an end to end process that looks very different to the one that your business is currently following.

With a fresh look, unhindered by the lens of “this is how I learned recruitment and how it has always been done,” you will see that the Talent Acquisition process is far bigger than you believe it to be.

If you take the creation of a new requisition as the current standard for the “starting point,” everything you know and understand is to the right of this point.

But what about the left?

The left is a space entirely occupied by the operational manager. They have been left to stagnate and drift aimlessly along with no direction. As already noted, it is the operational manager that instigates the recruiting process...

All managers are different. With different jobs, different responsibilities, different priorities and different skill levels when it comes to recruiting.

They are the person that accepts a resignation. Knows when a team member is due to leave on parental leave, or is planned to retire. They also know their own plans around team growth and project related resources needed. And finally, they are best placed to predict if team members may be leaving due to performance or may need moving on to retain them for Talent purposes.

They hold information that is vital to Talent Acquisition. They are the key to proactive, quality driven hiring.

It is the gulf that exists before the conventional Talent Acquisition process you know begins. It is a source of enormous operational improvement and business people resourcing transformation. More on that later.

The concept is an easy one to understand; if managers are engaged earlier, the delay between a manager knowing that they will need to recruit at some point in the future and starting the recruiting process will be minimised.

The art of the possible with pre-recruitment really depends on your imagination and lateral thinking!

Reducing the delay in the manager acting effectively increases the lead time on new hires needed by the business. More time means:

A manager wakes up one morning and realises that a team member is leaving in 2 weeks and they haven't arranged cover yet. They create a new requisition in the ATS and instigate the recruiting process. The recruitment process takes 50 days (a good result)! This manager therefore has an “empty chair” in their team for 36 days (50 minus the 2 weeks until the leaver exits).

A manager is proactively asked about their team and informs TA about a leaver they are aware of in 5 months time. The TA team use this information to tell the manager at the exact point they need the requisition to be created in order to fill the vacancy in time, e.g. 100 days before the hire is needed. The recruitment process ensues, and the hire is made on the date it is needed. The Time to Hire is 100 days, but the manager has zero days without cover.

A successful hiring process often hinges on the ability and commitment of the hiring manager. Lots of companies attempt to create “manager tool-kits” with resources intended to educate the manager on the part they play. This is great, but the timing and accessibility of these resources is key to them having any effect. Pre-Recruitment coaching is an opportunity to drip feed this learning content nice and early. A chance to “onboard” your managers to the job of recruiting. So that when you need them, they are fully briefed and ready to work with you. Not be unwitting blockers to the process!

Building a business case to explain the benefits of Pre-Recruitment and gain buy in from your C-Suite is straightforward.

Any leader managing a P&L, a budget, or that are responsible for delivering “output” via their teams will already be looking for ways to maximise productivity.

They will already be using tools and technologies to do more with less. They will already be streamlining how their teams work (just like you do in HR/Talent Acquisition).

They will know that having a full, capable, competent team for more of the time, will result in greater productivity and more output. Meaning more value will be delivered for the organisation.

If we then look to quantify this position, we need to calculate your business average daily EVC (Employee Value Cost).

This is the monetary value that each employee adds to the bottom line of your business.

A worked example:

Company A’s annual revenue is £250m and they employ 5,000 people.

For this company, every “empty chair” day is costing £192. This same company may have 100 open vacancies at any one time, with 80% of them having an “empty chair”…

That’s £15,000 per day in lost productivity. Nearly £4,000,000 per year.

Wrong. Companies of all sizes have already recognised the existence of Pre-Recruitment and are working hard to realise the enormous benefits of utilising and maximising the extra time that having a solid Pre-Recruitment approach will bring.

Businesses like and are leading a new frontier of transformation in Talent Acquisition and are redefining what is meant by an “end to end” process.

These pioneers are creating actual 12-24 months hiring plans, by geography, function and team. They are changing manager behaviour and beginning to reap the rewards that 100+ days lead time on vacancies and a more engaged and educated hiring manager population brings.

They know that conventional, reactive recruitment is an unacceptable and unsustainable way to operate, and they are focused on delivering reductions in “Empty Chair Time” for their businesses; meaning productivity improvement and bottom-line performance enhancement.

They are positioning Talent Acquisition as a business enabler and a profit centre.

They are moving the curve.

If you want to understand how you can claim your Pre-Recruitment time zone, and even better how you can benefit from everything described within a matter of months, please contact us to learn more about Foresight, the leading Pre-Recruitment system.