I was struck by an article in ere.net (www.ere.net) by Dr. John Sullivan. He is a long time professor of Management a t San Francisco State University, and has written many articles and consulted on the “War on Talent” for some time. I do not agree with him on many things, but he published an article in ERE.Net entitled “The End of Sourcing Is Near … the Remaining Recruiting Challenge Is Selling”. Dr. Sullivan’s premise is that the age of sourcing and identifying talent is over. Most of this is caused by the many data bases, social networking (Linked In, Facebook, Twitter e.g.), job boards, corporate web sites, etc… So finding talent is now easy because 100’s of million people have a footprint on the internet. In fact Dr. Sullivan says that recruiters would not be necessary. I disagree with that because Dr. Sullivan proposes that manager will go on line and locate talent and call them.
The problems with this notion, of course;
1. Very few people are comfortable to make a cold call to anyone
2. Managers do not have the time to troll through the internet and sort through Boolean streams.
So don’t worry recruiters you will always be needed. A recruiter has the skill set and experience to drive a candidate through an internal process and close the wanted individual.
But, what I did take away from Dr. Sullivan’s article was that we need to do more selling to the candidate. When I think about the “war on talent” I think about the competition by multiple companies to hire the same talent. So, as a company, you will find Mr./Miss Right, but who else are you competing against? How do you get that candidate to be an employee going from step A to step Z within your hiring process? That’s how you win the “war on talent”. Selling, instead of just weeding out, is required when you are hiring quality talent. In this economy, companies do not hire many people at one time and then sort out the high performers and okay performers – they hire less, but more specialized. So just finding the talent is not enough. Not giving your candidate a reason to choose your company or have him/her languish in an exhaustive process will chase him/her away.
The Real War on Talent 